


The Table to My Right

by ellacj



Category: Original Work
Genre: Adoption, Based on a True Story, Breakfast
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-23
Updated: 2015-01-23
Packaged: 2018-03-08 17:21:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3217316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellacj/pseuds/ellacj
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An inspiring conversation overheard at Perkins one night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Table to My Right

**Author's Note:**

> All this happened a few days ago and it was so adorable I just had to write it. This piece is also my entry for a national writing competition so hopefully it's not too terrible.

I was at Perkins the other day.

I went there by myself, on my way to a practice with my coach. And the thing is, when you’re at Perkins by yourself, you get some funny looks. So I took to scrolling aimlessly on my phone and listening to the conversations around me.

There was one that particularly grabbed my attention, at the table to my right. It was a big family, a mother and her four kids and her parents all crowded around a table at Perkins in Apple Valley, Minnesota. Now, these kids were quite young – not one of them was over the age of seven.

I drifted in and out of their conversation as I waited for my food, but here’s what I gleaned from those bits and pieces: they live in Iowa, the mother isn’t married anymore, and they had a six-hour drive home as soon as they were done eating. I wasn’t really looking at them (my pancakes required my attention in order not to spill on myself), but I heard something drift over from the table that made me keep listening.

“Where’s my real mom?”

That made me glance over. The speaker, I assumed, was the little Asian girl sitting at the table populated by her white family. It was the grandmother sitting next to her that answered. “Do you mean your birthmom?”

The little girl nodded and I noticed that the rest of the family had stopped talking and was focused on her. Her mom stopped yelling at her two sons to stop playing with their food and the boys stopped playing with their food. “Where’s my real mom?” she asked again, looking at her mother. I hoped for her sake she didn’t see the way her mother deflated ever so slightly, and the way her hands clenched on the table.

“I’m your real mom, sweetheart.”

“But what about my other mom?”

I turned my attention back to my food at this point, lest they notice me listening, and when I tuned back in, the girl was talking to her grandmother again.

“Your birthmom is in China,” her grandmother explained carefully.

“How come I’m not in China?”

The grandmother and the mother exchanged a look, but the grandmother again was the one who answered. “Because your mommy went to China and adopted you.”

The girl looked confused for a moment, and she tilted her head. “What’s ‘dopted mean?”

“It means we chose you.” This time it was her mother cutting in again.

“How come my birthmom didn’t choose me?”

By this point my heart was pounding and I couldn’t believe I had gotten so invested in this little girl and her family. There was a really long pause before the mom answered and when she finally did is when I found out I’d been holding my breath.

“She did choose you,” her mom said, with all the urgency of a snail on vacation. “But she couldn’t keep you for herself. She chose you by sending you to live with a loving family who could take care of you. Is that okay?”

The girl took a long moment to think. “Yeah,” she said, as though it was no big deal. And then she went back to eating her food while her mother sighed in relief and turned to break up yet another fight between her two sons.

I went back to eating as well, until I heard something else from the table.

“What if you didn’t choose me?” It was the girl again, looking at her mom with big eyes.

“Then I would be the only girl,” her older sister said. She was maybe six years old, with one of those awful haircuts that all kids have at some point. I would have been worried if it wasn’t so obvious that her mom loved all of her kids as much as a mom can love a kid, and took care of them all by herself.

Her grandmother smiled and reached across the table to ruffle her badly cut hair. “Yes you would be.”

But the mother wasn’t looking at her older daughter or at her mother. She was looking directly at her adoptive daughter with all the love and happiness in her eyes of a woman holding her child in her arms for the first time. “If we didn’t choose you, you’d still be in the orphanage in China.”

“What if someone else chose me?”

Her mom shook her head and I was far away but I could swear there were tears in her eyes. “Then we would have missed out.”

I’ve never heard a response better than that and I’m not ashamed to say that I myself was close to crying into my pancakes. The girl’s mom got up and walked around the table to hug her, and her sister and grandmother joined them after a second too. It was right then that I whipped out the notebook I never leave home without and wrote down their entire conversation to write this exact piece.

I tuned out their words after that, but when they got up and left to start their six-hour drive home, I caught that little girl’s eye and I smiled at her. They both deserve so much more than this world can give them, but they’re trying their best to make up the deficit. And even from that short little conversation I overheard in Perkins one night I know there’s no deficit of love in this family.

Someday, I’m going to have this conversation with my children. It’s inevitable, considering adoption is pretty much my only option. I can only hope that ten, fifteen, twenty years from now, I’ll remember this woman and her daughter. And if I can give my kids half the response this woman gave hers, I’ll be a mother for the history books.

I finished my food in silence that day, already missing the bright conversation from the family formerly at the table to my right. But I kept running through their words in my head and trying to figure out some way to do it justice on the page. And of course, no writer can truly capture the feeling of just being there, witnessing one of the most beautiful family moments I’ve ever seen, but I tried my best to harness the love I felt emanating from that table and committing it to paper.

My waiter came back shortly after the family left and gave me my free slice of pie and my bill. I asked for a box for the pancakes I didn’t finish because I was so busy listening and I went up to the counter to pay, but not before offering one last little smirk to the table to my right.

A smirk almost like we had a secret affair.

And maybe it is a bit like a secret, because no one really knows what transpired at that table except for that family and me; the lucky stranger that ended up sitting just a few feet away from a miracle. And now you too, dear reader, are in on the secret. Hush, hush.

I sent off a quick text to my coach because the family had me so intrigued I was now running late to practice, and I grabbed my car keys from the pay counter. And with two Styrofoam boxes in my arms, I left the restaurant and went back into the cold.

You get a lot of funny looks when you eat at Perkins by yourself. But really, it’s not all bad. Sitting alone and listening to conversations from the table to your right, you might just learn something about the world.

And about yourself.


End file.
